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Digital Content Review: Process and Results

Version 1.1 - date last updated: 2 March 2016

Purpose

The digital content review process assists repositories with achieving effective preservation planning, which relies upon current, comprehensive, and cumulative information about digital content that an organization is currently managing and/or anticipates managing. To complete a digital content review, the digital preservation team gathers information and iteratively accumulates as part of a structured process. The results of ongoing digital content reviews produce a digital content review dataset that enables near-term and long-term planning by organizations.

Scope

A digital content review:

is a structured process to complete a gap analysis for your majority of digital content types

uses a template with questions pertaining to decisions and current practice for life cycle stages including: selecting, acquiring, processing, storing, preserving, disseminating, and managing rights

documents the current status of your workflow and practice for each digital content type

recommends possible solutions and priorities for addressing implications of taking in or acquiring more digital content of a particular type

Implementation

Each review includes these components:

1. Individual digital content overviews:

note: content that is not digital and is not a candidate to be digitized are not reflected in digital content overviews; physical or analog content that is replaced by digital formats will be reflected in versions of the digital content overview results when the digital content is acquired

Provide a concise scope for each digital content type that reflects key aspects of life cycle management rather than subject-based categories and descriptive metadata, which is extensively captured and tracked in other processes and systems

Develop a diagram with categories of content for each content type, known relationships between categories, relative size of categories within the content type, and a rough indication of the amount of content that is currently managed and known to be anticipated to support planning and growth

Identify categories within each content type that have common life cycle-based characteristics (e.g., use a common workflow to receive content from producers, are processed be a central unit or using a common workflow once received, are discovered or made available in a common way)

Represent categories within categories as:

circles (nicknamed "buckets") for content that is currently managed

triangles for known content that is managed elsewhere on campus, and

squares for content that is provided as a service but not managed or preserved by the DP program

Category definitions within each digital content are based on factors including: the type of content (e.g., source), how content is received, how it is processed, how content is discovered and used, and how rights may effect use

Iterations of the overviews show the accumulation of content over time and progress towards addressing objectives for managing and providing content more effectively

2. Individual digital content reports:

Produces one or more concise reports per content type, depending on the results of the overview (can the range of content be captured in one report?

Externalize: share your results with the community and encourage feedback

Provenance

About the Digital Content Review process:

the need for organizations to explicitly develop a high-level inventory has been called out by the DPM workshops from the start of the program in 2003, we identify the absence of a content inventory as a showstopper for the Technology Leg (essential for preservation planning)

informed by the curriculum we developed for the DPM workshops, Nancy McGovern developed a very basic version for use at Cornell University Library (2005); elaborated on that basic digital content review process while at ICPSR (2006-2011) with the addition of a report template and a structured process for completing these life cycle reports as well as a set of examples; and further extended the process at MIT Libraries with digital content overviews and the definition of a DCR dataset, a curation dataset to continually manage digital content (2012-on) - the cumulative results of those examples are reflected in this overview of the DCR process

Helen Bailey at MIT Libraries completed a linked data project to demonstrate how the DCR dataset might be managed as her research project during her Digital Curation and Preservation Library Fellowship that she described in her blog and we are continuing to work towards a production version